The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In 1620, New England was far from paradise. Indeed, the New World was, in many ways, much like the Old—a place where the fertility of the soil was a concern, a place where disease and war were constant threats. There were profound differences between the Pilgrims and Pokanokets to be sure—especially when it came to technology, culture, and spiritual beliefs—but in these early years, when an alliance appeared to be good for both of them, the two peoples had more in common than is generally thought today. For the Pilgrims, some of whom had slept in a wigwam and all of whom had enjoyed eating and drinking with the Indians during that First Thanksgiving, these were not barbarians (even if some of their habits, such as their refusal to wear clothes, struck them as “savage”); these were human beings, much like themselves—“very trust[worth]y, quick of apprehension, ripe witted, just,” according to Edward Winslow.

  For his part, Massasoit had managed one of the great comebacks of all time. Once in danger of being forced to pay tribute to the Narragansetts, he had found a way to give the Pokanokets, who were now just a fraction of the Narragansetts in terms of population, a kind of equality with the rival tribe. Massasoit had come to the Pilgrims’ rescue when, as his son would remember fifty-four years later, the English were “as a little child.” He could only hope that the Pilgrims would continue to honor their debt to the Pokanokets long after the English settlement had grown into maturity.

  PART II

  Community

  EIGHT

  The Wall

  IN MID-NOVEMBER, Bradford received word from the Indians on Cape Cod that a ship had appeared at Provincetown Harbor. It had been just eight months since the departure of the Mayflower, and the Pilgrims were not yet expecting a supply ship from the Adventurers in London. It was immediately feared that the ship was from England’s mortal enemy, France.

  For more than a week, the ship stayed at the tip of Cape Cod. Then, at the end of November, a lookout atop Fort Hill saw it turn toward Plymouth Harbor. Many of the men were out working in the surrounding countryside and had to be called back immediately. A cannon was fired, and the tiny settlement was filled with excitement as men rushed in from all directions while standish assembled them into a fighting force. soon, in the words of Edward Winslow, “every man, yea, boy that could handle a gun were ready, with full resolution, that if [the ship] were an enemy, we would stand in our just defense.”

  To their amazement and delight, it proved to be an English ship: the Fortune, about a third the size of the Mayflower, sent by the Adventurers with thirty-seven passengers aboard. In an instant, the size of the colony had almost doubled.

  Everyone aboard the Fortune was in good health, and almost immediately after coming ashore, Martha Ford gave birth to a son, John. But all was not well. Most of the new passengers were single men who must have been upset at the lack of young women among the Pilgrims. With the arrival of the Fortune, there was now a total of sixty-six men in the colony and just sixteen women. For every eligible female, there were six eligible men, and for young girls such as fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Tilley, nineteen-year-old Priscilla Mullins, and fourteen-year-old Mary Chilton (all of them orphans), the mounting pressure to marry must have been intense. Plus, there was no place to put all the passengers. Bradford had no choice but to divide them up among the preexisting seven houses and four public buildings.

  But the biggest problem created by the arrival of the Fortune had to do with food. Weston had failed to provide the passengers aboard the Fortune with any provisions for the settlement. Instead of strengthening their situation, the addition of thirty-seven more mouths to feed at the beginning of winter put them in a difficult position. Bradford figured out that even if they cut their daily rations in half, their current store of corn would last only another six months. After a year of relentless toil and hardship, they faced yet another winter without enough food. “[B]ut they bore it patiently,” Bradford wrote, “under hope of [future] supply.”

  Happily, there were some familiar faces aboard the Fortune. The Brewsters welcomed their eldest son, Jonathan, a thirty-seven-year-old ribbon weaver, whom they hadn’t seen in almost a year and a half. Others from Leiden included Philip de la Noye, whose French surname was eventually changed to Delano and whose descendants would include future U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The newly remarried Edward Winslow greeted his twenty-four-year-old brother, John. There was also Thomas Prence, the twenty-one-year-old son of a Gloucestershire carriage maker, who soon became one of the leading members of the settlement.

  The most notable new arrival was Robert Cushman, whose chest pains aboard the Speedwell during the summer of 1620 had convinced him to remain in England. Cushman was the one who had negotiated the agreement with Thomas Weston that stated how the Pilgrims would pay the Adventurers—the agreement that Bradford and the others had refused to honor in southampton. It was now time, Cushman told them, to sign the controversial agreement. Cushman also presented the Pilgrims with a new patent from the Council for New England making it legal for them to live in Plymouth, rather than by the Hudson River.

  Unfortunately, from Cushman’s perspective, Weston had also written a letter to the now deceased Governor Carver, which scolded the Pilgrims for not having loaded the Mayflower with goods for her return to England. “I know your weakness was the cause of it,” Weston wrote, “and I believe more weakness of judgment than weakness of hands.”

  Bradford was naturally outraged by Weston’s accusation. Bradford acknowledged that the Adventurers had, so far, nothing to show for their investment, but their losses were only financial. Governor Carver had worked himself to death that spring, and “the loss of his and many other industrious men’s lives cannot be valued at any price.”

  Despite his criticisms, Weston claimed to be one of the few financial backers the Pilgrims could still count on. “I promise you,” he wrote, “I will never quit the business, though all the other Adventurers should.” Only after Cushman assured them that Weston was a man to be trusted did Bradford and the others reluctantly sign the agreement.

  Over the next two weeks, they loaded the Fortune with beaver skins, sassafras, and clapboards made of split oak (much smaller than modern clapboards, they were used for making barrels instead of siding for houses). Valued at around £500 (roughly $100,000 today), the cargo came close to cutting their debt in half. Certainly this would help restore the Adventurers’ confidence in the settlement.

  On December 13, 1621, after a stay of just two weeks, the Fortune was on her way back to London. Cushman returned with her, leaving his fourteen-year-old son, Thomas, in Bradford’s care. In addition to Bradford’s letter to Weston, Cushman was given a manuscript account of the Pilgrims’ first thirteen months in America that was published the following year and is known today as Mourt’s [an apparent mispelling of the editor George Morton’s last name] Relation. Written by Bradford and Edward Winslow, the small book ends with Winslow’s upbeat account of the First Thanksgiving and the abundance of the New World. But, just days after the Fortune’s departure, the Pilgrims had reason to question Winslow’s happy view of life in Plymouth.

  ◆◆◆ The Pilgrims soon began to realize that their alliance with the Pokanokets had created serious problems with the far more powerful Narragansetts. The previous summer, William Bradford had exchanged what he felt were positive and hopeful messages with the Narragansett sachem, Canonicus. since then, however, Canonicus had grown increasingly jealous of the Pokanoket-Plymouth alliance. The Narragansetts, it was rumored, were preparing to attack the English settlement.

  Toward the end of November, a Narragansett messenger arrived at Plymouth looking for squanto. He had a mysterious object from Canonicus in his hands. When he learned that the interpreter was away, he “seemed rather to be glad than sorry” and hurriedly handed over what the Pilgrims soon realized was a bundle of arrows wrapped in the skin of a rattlesnake.

  When squanto returned to Plymouth, he told them that the arrows were “no better than a challenge.�
�� Bradford responded by pouring gunpowder and bullets into the snakeskin and sending it back to Canonicus. This appeared to have the desired effect. “[I]t was no small terror to the savage king,” Winslow reported, “insomuch as he would not once touch the powder and shot, or suffer it to stay in his house or country.” The powder-stuffed snakeskin was passed like a hot potato from village to village until it finally made its way back to Plymouth.

  Despite this response, the Pilgrims were deeply troubled by the Narragansett threat. Their little village was, they realized, wide open to attack. Their cannons might pose a threat to a ship attempting to enter Plymouth Harbor but were of little use in stopping Native warriors, especially if they attacked at night.

  Bradford, doubtless at standish’s urging, decided to build an eight-foot-high wall of wood around the entire settlement. If they were to include the cannon platform atop Fort Hill and their dozen or so houses on Cole’s Hill below it, the wall had to be at least 2,700 feet—more than a half mile—in length. Hundreds, if not thousands, of trees needed to be cut down, their trunks stripped of branches and chopped or sawed to the proper length, then set deep into the ground. The tree trunks of the fort had to be set so tightly together that a man could not possibly fit through the gaps between them. In addition, standish insisted that they construct three protruding gates, known as flankers, that would also serve as defensive shooting platforms in case of attack.

  By any measure, it was a huge task, but for a workforce of fewer than fifty men living on starvation rations, it was almost impossible. The vast majority of the new arrivals were strangers, and even though they tended to be young and strong, they were less likely to help the Pilgrim separatists with such an awesome labor.

  The differences between the strangers and the Pilgrims quickly came to a head on December 25. For the Pilgrims, Christmas was a day just like any other; for most of the strangers from the Fortune, on the other hand, it was a religious holiday, and they informed Bradford that it was “against their consciences” to work on Christmas. Bradford reluctantly gave them the day off and led the rest of the men out for the usual day’s work.

  But when they returned at noon, they found the once quiet streets of Plymouth in a state of joyous bedlam. The strangers were playing games, including stool ball, a cricketlike game popular in the west of England. This was typical of how most Englishmen spent Christmas, but this was not the way the members of a pious Puritan community were to conduct themselves. Bradford proceeded to take away the players’ balls and bats. It was not fair, he insisted, that some played while others worked. If they wanted to spend Christmas praying quietly at home, that was fine by him; “but there should be no gaming or reveling in the streets.”

  Writing about this confrontation years later, Bradford claimed it was “rather of mirth than of weight.” And yet, for a young governor who had to face not only the challenges presented by a hostile Native nation but a growing divide among his own people, it was a crucial incident. It was now clear that no matter how it was done in England, Plymouth played by its own, God-ordained rules, and everyone—separatist or Anglican—was expected to obey.

  For many of the new arrivals, it was all quite astonishing. Bradford had declared it illegal to follow the customs of their mother country. But, for now they had more important things to worry about than whether or not it was right to play stool ball on Christmas Day. The Narragansetts were threatening, and they had a wall to build.

  ◆◆◆ It took them a little more than a month to build the wall. The chopping and sawing was backbreaking, time-consuming work made all the more difficult by their equipment. Narrow and poorly balanced, an English ax wobbled with each stroke, and without oxen to help them drag the tree trunks in from the forest, they were forced to lug the ten- to twelve-foot lengths of timber by hand. They dug a two- to three-foot-deep trench, first using picks to break through the frozen topsoil and then, in all likelihood, a large hoelike tool to dig a trench that was deep and wide enough to accommodate the ends of the logs. Adding to their difficulties was the lack of food. some of the workers grew so faint with hunger that they were seen to stagger on their way back to the settlement at the end of the day.

  Nevertheless, by March, it was complete: a massive, sap-dripping, bark-peeling wall between them and the surrounding forest. A new sense of order and control had been placed upon the wilderness. Plymouth was now a defined settlement. By building the wall, the Pilgrims had made it clear that they intended to remain there for a very long time.

  Miles standish developed a military plan to go with the new fortress. The men were divided into four companies, each with its own commander, and were assigned positions and duties to perform in the event of an attack. There was also a plan in case a fire should break out. Most of the men would work to put out the flames, but a group was assigned to stand on guard in case the Indians attempted to use the fire as a diversion. standish drilled the men regularly and set up plans to enact if he should be away from the settlement during an attack. They were now ready to reestablish contact with the rest of the world.

  ◆◆◆ They had long since planned to visit the Massachusetts to the north to trade for furs. But as they prepared the shallop to depart, Hobbamock, the Pokanoket pniese who had led the midnight raid on Nemasket the summer before and who had been living with the Pilgrims throughout the winter, asked to speak with Bradford and standish. Hobbamock had heard that the Massachusetts had become allies with the Narragansetts and were planning to attack standish and the trading party. With standish eliminated, the Narragansetts would then attack the settlement. Even more disturbing, Hobbamock insisted that squanto was in on the plot. According to Hobbamock, all that winter, while the Pilgrims had been building their wall, squanto had been meeting secretly with Indians throughout the region.

  Without letting squanto know of Hobbamock’s claims, standish and Bradford met with several members of the community to discuss what to do next. As they all knew, they could not simply “mew up ourselves in our new-enclosed town.” They were running out of food. If they were to trade for more corn, they needed to leave their own settlement. They decided standish would depart immediately for his trading mission with the Massachusetts and show no signs of knowing about a possible Massachusett-Narragansett alliance.

  Left unresolved was how to treat Hobbamock’s accusations concerning squanto. As had become obvious to all of them, the two Indians were very jealous of each other. It was quite possible that Hobbamock had lied about squanto’s involvement in the conspiracy, if indeed a conspiracy existed at all. Bradford and squanto had developed a strong relationship over the last year, while standish and Hobbamock had also become close. Rather than confront squanto, it was decided to use the rivalry between the two Indians to their advantage.

  In April, standish and ten men, accompanied by both squanto and Hobbamock, departed in the shallop for Massachusetts. A few hours later, an Indian who was a member of squanto’s family appeared outside the gates of town. His face was bloody, and he had apparently been running for a long time. He kept looking behind him as if those who had been chasing him might appear at any moment. He shouted out that he had come from Nemasket and he had frightening news. The Narragansetts had teamed up with the Pokanokets for an assault on Plymouth. Being a member of squanto’s family, he had spoken in the Pilgrims’ defense and had, as a consequence, received a blow to the head. The enemy might be on their doorstep at any moment.

  ◆ A German-made rapier attributed to Miles Standish.

  It was a strange, alarming, and confusing performance. It was difficult to believe that Massasoit had joined with the Narragansetts against them. The timing also seemed suspicious. The Indian had arrived just after standish and company had left for Massachusetts. Without their military leader to protect them, the Pilgrims were especially vulnerable. Indeed, the Indian’s sudden appearance seemed calculated to provoke a quick and possibly disastrous response on the Pilgrims’ part.

  Given Hobbamock’s recent cla
ims about squanto, there was ample reason to suspect that he was behind all this. But why was squanto attempting to get them to attack Massasoit? Bradford immediately ordered that the cannons be fired as a warning signal. It was probably too late to call standish back, but it was important that anyone working in the countryside return to the safety of town.

  As it turned out, standish was in earshot of the signal. Upon hearing the signal, he and his men immediately turned back for town—something squanto, who was in fact the one behind this drama, had never anticipated.

  Back at the settlement, Hobbamock angrily insisted that the claims of squanto’s relatives were all lies. Being a pniese, he was certain he would have been consulted by Massasoit if the sachem had been planning some kind of attack. Bradford “should do well,” Hobbamock insisted, “to continue his affections” toward Massasoit. so as not to create any unnecessary suspicion, it was decided to send Hobbamock’s wife to Pokanoket, where she could determine whether there was any truth to the claims of squanto’s relative.

  As Hobbamock had predicted, all was peace at Pokanoket. Hobbamock’s wife revealed the reason behind her visit to Massasoit, who was outraged to learn that squanto had attempted to turn the Pilgrims against him.

  Over the next few weeks, it became increasingly clear that squanto had been working long and hard to overthrow Massasoit. All winter he had been spreading false rumors to villages throughout the region. The Pilgrims, he claimed, possessed the plague, and they were about to unleash it. However, if a village sent him sufficient tribute, squanto told them that he could prevent the Pilgrims from spreading disease. Gradually, more and more Indians began to look to squanto rather than Massasoit for protection. squanto had hoped the false alarm raised by his family member might cause the Pilgrims to attack Massasoit and so squanto would emerge as New England’s most important Native leader.